R.U.R., in full R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, drama in three acts by Karel Čapek, published in 1920 and performed in 1921. This cautionary play, for which Čapek invented the word robot (derived from the Czech word for forced labour), involves a scientist named Rossum who discovers the secret of creating humanlike machines. He establishes a factory to produce and distribute these mechanisms worldwide. Another scientist decides to make the robots more human, which he does by gradually adding such traits as the capacity to feel pain. Years later, the robots, who were created to serve humans, have come to dominate them completely.

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any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort, though it may not resemble human beings in appearance or perform functions in a humanlike manner. By extension, robotics is the engineering discipline dealing with the design, construction, and operation of robots.

labour performed involuntarily and under duress, usually by relatively large groups of people. Forced labour differs from slavery in that it involves not the ownership of one person by another but rather merely the forced exploitation of that person’s labour.